Two ordinary 1970s habits that quietly made adulthood easier, and why we gave them up

Nostalgia for the 1970s is easy to overdo, and worth resisting. It was not a golden age; plenty of what passed for normal back then was worse than what replaced it, and the people who lived through it were not calmer or wiser than we are simply for having owned a rotary phone. But there is a narrower and more defensible claim hiding inside the usual rose-tinted sighing, which is that a few specific habits that were ordinary in that decade happened to reduce a kind of friction that modern life quietly reintroduced. The point is not that the era was better. It is that some of its practices made the daily business of being an adult a little easier, and that we abandoned a couple of them without noticing what they were doing for us.

Paying with money you could feel

The most consequential is the one that has almost vanished: paying for things with cash. In the 1970s, before credit cards saturated ordinary spending, most everyday purchases were settled with notes, coins, or a cheque, which meant that spending money involved physically parting with something. That friction sounds like a nuisance, and in some ways it was, but it turns out to have been doing useful work. In a well-known set of studies, Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester found that people were willing to pay substantially more for the same items when using a credit card than when using cash, with the difference reaching up to a hundred percent in some cases.

The mechanism is what researchers call the pain of paying. Handing over physical money hurts a little, and that small sting acts as a natural brake, a real-time signal that you are spending. Tapping a card, or now a phone, removes the sting almost entirely, which is precisely why it encourages you to spend more. The 1970s habit of paying in cash was not financially sophisticated, but it built a governor into everyday life that most of us have quietly dismantled. Adults then were not more disciplined than we are; their money was simply harder to spend without feeling it, and that made living within their means less a matter of willpower and more a matter of the friction already baked into how buying worked. You can reintroduce a version of this deliberately, using cash for the categories where you tend to overspend, and the modest inconvenience is the point rather than a flaw.

Cooking dinner from scratch

The second habit is cooking most meals at home from basic ingredients. This was not a lifestyle choice in the 1970s so much as the default, since eating out was less frequent and the vast apparatus of delivery apps and ready meals did not yet exist. It is tempting to dismiss the resulting home cooking as mere nostalgia for a warm kitchen, but the health difference is measurable. Analyzing national survey data from more than 9,000 American adults, Julia Wolfson and Sara Bleich found that people who cooked dinner at home more frequently had healthier diets overall, consuming fewer calories, less sugar, and less fat, and were less reliant on eating out.

The reason is not that home cooks are more virtuous but that cooking from scratch quietly settles a hundred small decisions in your favor without your having to fight each one. You control the portions, the fat, the salt, and the sugar simply by being the one holding the pan, whereas restaurant and packaged food is engineered to be as appealing as possible, which usually means richer and larger than what you would serve yourself. The 1970s adult who cooked on most nights was not tracking any of this; the good outcome was a side effect of the habit. That is the useful part. A default that produces a healthier diet without demanding daily discipline is easier to sustain than any regimen of counting and resisting, which is why rebuilding a version of it, even a few unglamorous weeknight meals, tends to work where willpower alone does not.

The pattern worth keeping

What links these habits is not the decade, and it is worth being clear about that so the nostalgia does not curdle into the tired belief that everything used to be better. It did not. What the two examples share is a structure. Each one built a small, automatic constraint into daily life, a bit of friction or a helpful default that produced good outcomes without requiring you to summon willpower in the moment. Much of modern convenience has worked in the opposite direction, stripping out that friction in the name of ease, which feels like progress and often is, but which also quietly removed the guardrails that used to make certain adult tasks manage themselves. The lesson is not to move back into the seventies. It is to notice which frictions were actually helping, and to put a few of them back on purpose, so that living sensibly depends less on heroic self-control and more on how your everyday habits are set up to run.